Imagine you are crossing a backcountry stream. There is snow up to your knees on both sides and there's ice on the rocks that stick out of the frothing water in this crossing which isn't too wide and the water's not too deep it's only about

six inches or so but but it's slick.

And halfway across, you fall, your feet go out from under,

you forward, so you fall on your back real hard.

And you get wet, and you feel kind of foolish, but you're a quarter mile from base camp, so it's not a big deal. You get home, you know, back to camp and get warm. You know it's not a survival situation, but when you lift your rifle out of that water,

you notice that your scope is smashed. It impacted a rock and glass is literally pouring out of the scope tube in fragments.

The lenses are crushed.

The aluminum tube is distorted into something that hardly even looks

like a scope anymore. And you are a guide that has weeks left of clients on Elkhunz that you're supposed to protect in

Bear Country and back up when they need it.

I'm Joseph von Benedict and this is the backcountry hunting

podcast and today we're gonna take up part two of rifle maintenance and

backcountry first aid and the specific topic today is

optics and overcoming optic issues. Now when you hunt a lot with a lot of different brands and types you see a lot of

different failures and let me just make something clear right up front

all brands and all types can fail. The best

brands fail the least in the back country and that's I mean that's one of the big draws right you get better

optical clarity better mechanical reliability and precision and you get more

dependability that doesn't mean that those brands can't fail too. In my nine years

as a professional big game guide in Montana and Utah I saw several brands fail in my oh geez what is it now coming up on

14 15 years of work as a full-time outdoor rider.

I've seen multiple brands and multiple types of optics fail,

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